Monday, December 1, 2008

LEARNING - Storage Question of the WEEK

Question of the week:

My customer wants an answer to the question regarding support for hyper-v on the DS4700 as soon as possible. I cannot find it in the support matrix. Do you know if Windows 2008 hyper-v is supported at this time?

Answer of the week:

The short answer is YES. The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for Hyper-V is the same as the HCL for Windows 2008. We’ve been working closely with Microsoft and even generated a solutions guide (attached) to introduce people to the features of Hyper-V. For those of you who may not know what Hyper-V is, it’s a hypervisor counsel for Windows 2008 (and beyond). It enables you to run multiple virtual machines on a single server, and supports many benefits in that environment. It is a fairly new player in the market, but is quickly gaining momentum. One of the big benefits of Hyper-V is the cost. One of the detractors is its limited supported OS types for the virtual servers running under it. You can read much more with the attached brochure.

Of course we’re still very closely tied with VMware, and are continuously working on supporting all of their features (kind of like supporting more than one operating system). I’ve attached a document that discusses some of these advances.

The thing to remember in a virtualized server environment is that a heterogeneous workload (random small IOs and large sequential IOs) are usually presented from a single server to the storage subsystem. The DS5000 (DS4000 and DS3000) are somewhat unique in their ability to handle multiple workloads with different characteristics simultaneously. Some of our competitors can handle the sequential IO’s fairly well, while others only handle random IO’s with any efficiency. This places us in a very good position in the virtualized environments. I’ve attached an ESG Whitepaper that validates this claim.

James Latham
DS3000/DS4000
Product Specialist

Storage Solutions Engenio Storage Group

LSI Logic Corporation

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